In 2014, the first game in the Five Nights at Freddy’s series did not go unnoticed. Initially released on the Steam platform, it puts the player in control of a night watchman, responsible for working in a mysterious pizzeria where several animatronics – robotic animals – are installed.
Alone in his control room, the player understands that the automatons come to life every night and wander the corridors in search of a victim to devour. To survive, the watchman must monitor the comings and goings of the animatronics using video surveillance screens, and close the doors of the room as soon as one of them approaches.
This first opus lays the foundations of the series, and especially of its horrific-childish atmosphere designed by the American Scott Cawthon. Five Nights at Freddy’s, FNaF for short, will be entitled to no less than nine official sequels, several hundred derivative games developed by fans, novels and now a film.
Standard bearer
The success of the game owes a lot to the spirit of the times: in 2014, YouTubers developed their audience via gaming videos rich in jump scares (events that take the viewer by surprise and make them jump). FNaF is full of them. If across the Atlantic, the videographer Markiplier has established himself as the standard bearer of the community, in France, the star videographer Squeezie is one of those who accompanied its explosion.
“I first discovered this universe thanks to one of his videos,” confirms cosplayer MayaMystic, who was 14 at the time. Almost ten years later, she is eagerly awaiting the film, even if she is worried about the treatment that the cinema industry reserves for this universe which she describes as “a part of her childhood”.
After this first success, Scott Cawthon continues the sequels at a sustained pace. If the series changes its initial concept relatively little, each episode introduces characters, animatronics and distils in very small doses clues about the motivations and origins of the different protagonists. “I think that the mysterious lore [the diegesis, the world in which the fiction takes place], revealed little by little and which you then have to interpret yourself, has a lot to do with the success of FNaF,” explains FonkyFouine. , a videographer who has produced several dozen videos about it that have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times each – ten times more than those where he simply plays the game.
Gray areas
A taste for mystery which can end up harming the coherence of the whole. Even though hordes of fans are still demanding more videos from FonkyFouine, he has slowed down his production to the point of stopping it completely, tired of the series’ developments: “The fourth episode was initially presented as the final chapter of the story. Then others arrived and changed things that, for me, were set in stone,” he regrets today.
For these very vocal fans, FNaF is not a series like any other. “Many were children at the time” when the first episodes were released, explains the videographer.
A generation grew up with these games, their derivatives, wrote their own fictions inspired by the universe of Scott Cawthon, sometimes to the point of developing an almost obsessive relationship with the latter. Mayamystic testifies that FNaF was for her and her friends “a kind of door” to creative activities. “I initially got into drawing and cosplaying inspired by FNaF characters,” she says of “her favorite game of all time.”
A creator in the background
In the United States, however, Scott Cawthon’s image has suffered from his political positions. In 2021, the man who defines himself as “Republican, Christian, anti-abortion, believing in God but also in equality, science and common sense” reveals on his website the donations he has made in the past , to politicians. Most of them to Republicans, including Donald Trump. A positioning that does not go over well with many young fans of his license, closer to the progressive values of the American left, many of them identifying as members of the LGBT community.
Mr. Cawthon (who did not respond to our interview requests) has, however, never made a secret of his opinions. He explained in 2014 that his previous works, games based on the teachings of the Bible, had been dictated to him by God. Their commercial failure, which was for him proof that “God does not exist or that He hates [him],” had then plunged him into a spiritual crisis – profound, although temporary.
His first big success, the secular Five Nights at Freddy’s, was inspired by the reception a video game critic gave to one of his other early works, Chipper
In June 2021, in a Reddit post, Scott Cawthon regretted having to defend himself from accusations of homophobia, explaining that he feared receiving visits to his home. A few days later, the forty-year-old announced on his site that he was retiring and entrusting the development of future opuses to a third-party studio, Steel Wool Studios. Scott Cawthon nevertheless keeps an eye on his license: he is thus credited, on the film, as creator and author.